


frost season

by schuylering



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-23
Updated: 2016-01-23
Packaged: 2018-05-15 19:46:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5797438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schuylering/pseuds/schuylering
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alexander dies. The world keeps turning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	frost season

**Author's Note:**

> warning for character death.

The house is still in the heat, as if the thick summer air is holding its breath, waiting. The metallic scent of blood hangs heavy in the bedroom, clinging the the ceiling and the corners: Angelica listens to the harsh sound of Alexander's breathing, lungs dragging in air even when she knows, they all know, how this is going to end. 

The children have been called in and hurried out again: none of them, Angelica or Eliza or Alexander, want them to be here at the end. Now it's only the three of them, the doctor waiting outside the door: there's nothing else to do, he'd explained to Angelica, who's insisted on talking to him in place of her sister. She cannot protect Eliza from everything, could never protect her from Alexander and all he's done to her, but she will at least make the effort. She was the one to hear the doctor's defeated sigh, his hopeless gesture. There's nothing to do but wait it out.

The only one of them who doesn't seem to believe that is Alexander himself, still whispering words past cracked lips, still breathing those harsh, dragging breaths. Angelica wonders if it's merely a reflex by now: after surviving so much, the feral instinctive part of him that clings to that survival won't allow him to die just yet. 

But there is no surviving this, Angelica knows, his instincts only drawing out his pain. She would wish him a swifter death, except that she can see Eliza's face from across the bed, the determined set of her face as she leans close, trying to make sense of what Angelica's sure is fevered nonsense. Though her expression is set, it's brittle: Angelica knows how it will break when he finally goes, and she can't bear even the thought of it. She doesn't know how any of the three of them are going to survive this.

"Eliza," Alexander whispers, the first word intelligible enough for Angelica to hear from where she's knelt on the other side of the bed. 

Eliza nods, determined. "Alexander." They don't seem to need to say anything else, gazes locked, Alexander's eyes clearer than they've been for hours. Angelica should look away, but she knows deep in her stomach what's about to happen, and selfishly she cannot deny herself the last few moments of Alexander, alive. 

There are a few moments of quiet, and then Eliza lets out a disbelieving sob, sudden and wretched, and that's when Angelica knows. Her sister buries her face in Alexander's chest, and Angelica finally turns away, letting Eliza be alone for a moment with her grief. She lets her own eyes close, tears slipping down her cheeks. She still holds Alexander's hand in hers--warm, but not for long--and she knows she needs to let go, call the doctor back in and explain to the children, but she needs just a moment. Just a moment.

 

 

Angelica finds Eliza the next day in Alexander's study, on her knees on the hard floor. As first it looks as if she's knelt there in prayer; as Angelica comes nearer, however, she sees the way her skirts are tangled, her back bent. As if she'd fallen there, unable to stand any longer, and now unable to get up.

There's a letter on her lap, and even if Angelica can't make out the words she knows immediately who it must be from. The lines stretch from one edge of the page to the other, crammed together like there is a shortage of paper, or merely a shortage of time: everything must be put down before it runs out. Alexander, always determined to be opaque, made transparent in everything he does. Did. Angelica closes her eyes, allowing a brief moment of hurt.

Eliza looks up then, her face so open, in such pain, that Angelica can hardly bear to look at her. "He wrote me," she says, her voice barely a whisper. "Before he died, he must have—he knew—" She covers her mouth with her hand, as if the anguish she's feeling cannot, should not be spoken. 

Angelica kneels beside her sister, shoaring up her shoulder against Eliza's. Eliza leans into her, closing her eyes. Glancing down, Angelica sees Alexander's hand spelling out the words, _The will of a merciful God must be good_. 

"I don't understand," Eliza says quietly, her hand falling from her mouth to the delicate silver cross at her throat. "I don't understand," she says again, more distraught, as if she thought saying it might help her find some elusive answer and now her hopes have been dashed. "I don't understand, I don't—" A sob looses itself from her throat, and she curves forward, as if from a blow to the chest. _I don't understand, I don't understand_ , she keeps whispering between sobs, as Angelica pulls her tight against her breast, rocking her slightly in a hopeless gesture. There will be no consoling her until she had worked, clawed, dragged her way through this pain. _I don't understand—_

_The will of a merciful God must be good_ , Angelica thinks, and hopes her sister believes it, because she knows she never will.

 

 

But Angelica does understand. When she reads the letters, reads the newspaper articles about how former Secretary Alexander Hamilton found himself on a barren rock above the Hudson that bright summer morning. She understands being so reliant on yourself that your own mind becomes a kind of talisman: you are smarter, you are better, you are good. She understands defending that: she has always understood men's worlds better than they are comfortable with, and she understands this too, a man's honor. We must defend what we have in this world. And if all you have in the world if yourself, well then. 

But Alexander had more than himself, and that's where she stops being able to fathom his mind: for thirty years he had Eliza by side, their children by his side. There is only one thing Angelica holds more dear to herself than herself, and that is Eliza, her family. She cannot, will not understand abandoning them for any reason, any circumstance. 

To hell with honor, she thinks bitterly: he had Eliza. Was that not enough?

 

 

The funeral is grueling, first the private gathering in Trinity churchyard, the plain wood box being given up to the earth, and then the public procession, the outpouring of grief. Angelica grits her teeth through it, not allowing herself even a tear. She holds little Phil on her hip so Eliza's hands are free to accept the condolences heaped on her, the clasped hands and the kissed cheeks. Eliza remains poised and gracious, murmuring thank yous, nodding her head. Angelica thinks not for the first time that her sister is made of iron, underneath her kind smiles and soft hands.

When they finally arrive home she helps put the children to bed. She makes sure Eliza is safe if sleepless, alone in the bed, and then she goes back down to the empty dark parlor. She sits down in one of the chairs, one nearest the fireplace that Alexander had always favored for its light and warmth. She closes her eyes, not shying away from the thought: Alexander, sitting in this chair as he never would again, fidgeting absently with the wire rims of his glasses. Ink smudged into the whorls of his fingertips, marking everything he touched. There's a dark streak on the upholstery that she knows is from an upended ink pot, and she smiles a little, remembering his horrified look after it tipped, trying to blot it up with his hands.

She's still smiling when the tears come, sudden and gasping. It seems so small, the idea that Alexander will never that comically wide-eyed face again, that she'll never see his ink-stained fingers cramped around a quill again, but it guts her, unexpected and breathtaking. She watched him die, she watched him gasp for breath and bleed. And yet, somehow it's this that seems so unexplainably sadder. 

She lets herself cry for him, then, that hungry look in his eye still not sated; she cries for Eliza, so lost, on her own now with her children and her sadness; she cries for herself, for what she lost when Alexander made the decision on that rocky ledge that his honor meant more than what he had waiting for him across the river. She lets herself cry until she doesn't feel anything at all, and then she gets up from the inkstained chair, and goes up to bed.

 

 

Eliza walks alone to the churchyard, most days. Angelica allows her that, keeping the children at home, letting Eliza take those hours for herself. Angelica knows it will only become harder, seven children still to raise and the mounting debts Angelica knows are logged in Alexander's neatly-kept checkbook. Angelica urges her to go, work through the broken look in her eyes and the memory of her cracked voice whispering, I don't understand.

Sometimes, though, they take the children with them; sometimes it's just Angelica by Eliza's side, walking with her quietly to the graveyard. The marble headstone is still being made—such short notice, the stonemasons had explained, and Eliza had bitten her lip, Angelica knew, to keep it from trembling. For now there is a rough-hewn wooden cross, made less macabre by the flowers Eliza (and others—Alexander is more popular in death than he'd ever been in life) leaves at its base. The turned-up earth is fresh, and then later in the summer overgrown with tiny weeds, and then bare again as the frost comes in.

Even when the ground has frozen through, though, Eliza still kneels down on it, bowing her head. Her sister has never minded the cold.

Now, as the autumn is finally giving in to winter, Angelica watches over Eliza's bent head, standing next to her at the edge of Alexander's grave. It's cold, but the air feels clear, clean, and Angelica might understand what Eliza loves about this time of year. Eliza is whispering to herself, a prayer in tone if not in words. Angelica lets it wash over her, her sister's soft voice and the cool   
winter air, the gray sky soft above them. Angelica believes in Heaven only because it would crush her family if she didn't--would crush Eliza if she didn't, though after these cruel few years Eliza is truly the only family she has left. Standing here now, though, she understands it better: the air feels alive here. Everything taut, breathing and waiting.

Eliza looks up at her, eyes worn from crying but dry. There's a spark in them, below the sadness that, Angelica thinks with a pull in her chest, will always be there now. 

"I have an idea," her Eliza says, voice calm and sure. "There's something I want to do."

And with that she stands up on her own, unminding of the grave dirt clinging to her skirts. Her chin is up, her back straight, that core of steel hidden away in her spine. Angelica knows she feels it too, the waiting, the living air. 

Eliza brushes her fingers over the wood cross, closing her eyes for only a moment. Then she looks to Angelica, eyes open and bright again, expression determined. "I'm ready," she says.

**Author's Note:**

>  _The will of a merciful God must be good_ is an actual quote from one of the two last letters that alexander wrote to eliza; you can read the whole thing [here](http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-26-02-0001-0262).
> 
> i'm over on tumblr at [schuylering](http://schuylering.tumblr.com/).


End file.
